The Mafia Hitman's Daughter
by Linda Scarpa with Linda Rosencrance
Greg Scarpa was also known as The Grim Reaper, which probably tells you everything you need to know about his primary skill sets and value to the Profaci (later Colombo) Crime Family of which he was a ranking member. Scarpa boasted that he had stopped counting the number of people whom he had murdered after around fifty or so.
Some accounts indicate that the number of murders he either committed personally (Scarpa was a hands on leader) or ordered could be somewhere between eighty and one hundred. The FBI employed Scarpa to intimidate and/or torture KKK members for information, something he boasted about to his family.
Somewhat surprisingly Scarpa had an unconventional home life. He married one woman and had four children with her. Sometime during that marriage Scarpa fell in love with another woman and had two children with her. However he didn't marry her. That woman, Linda Schiro, didn't want the stigma of having children outside of wedlock so she married (and cuckolded) another man.
Cuckoldry became something of a recurring theme as Schiro later, with Scarpa's apparent enthusiastic support, took up with a delivery boy who would later become part of Scarpa's criminal network. Another book I read that focused on this family claimed that Scarpa would occasionally interrogate the younger man to ensure that he was properly satisfying Schiro. Hmm.
Those must have been some rather uncomfortable conversations.
I guess the Mafia was not immune to changing sexual mores. I also guess that people who wanted to keep breathing did not needle Scarpa about his wife's behavior. You don't get a nickname like The Grim Reaper by letting people insult your common-law wife.
Angel Has Fallen
directed by Ric Roman Waugh
This is the third installment in an action adventure series that centers around men who try to kidnap or kill the President and the Secret Service agents who try to stop them. The movie is not boring. It is comfortable in the same way that wrapping yourself in a favorite old blanket is. As long as you don't care about the frayed ends, questionable spots, and rips where the stuffing is falling out, no one else will either.
The quality of the acting and the cinematography are all what you would expect from work that involves A-list actors. The writing? Well like I said it is a comfortable sequel. The bad guys are way too obvious. People who don't even like or watch movies like this would be able to tell you who the bad guys are and what they want in the first ten minutes of the film.
That's not really a good thing.
Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is a Secret Service agent who is getting up there in age. He suffers from migraines, concussions and other pains from his Secret Service work and military experiences. It's about time for Banning to move out of the direct field work and take a promotion to head of the Secret Service. It's Washington D.C.'s worst kept secret that Banning will get the spot after the current Secret Service director David Gentry (Lance Reddick) retires.
But Banning doesn't want to do that, because among other reasons, he still enjoys the frontline experience of being on President Trumbull's (Morgan Freeman) security detail. He doesn't want to sit behind a desk and do fake battle with corpulent staffers, Senators, and lobbyists for his budget each year.
In the movie Black Panther, Killmonger talks to a British museum curator, testing her expertise on various African artwork and artifacts. When Killmonger finds the item he's looking for and not so coincidentally tells the curator that she is incorrect about its origin, he informs her that she need not worry about such things any more as he is going to take it off her hands.
She haughtily tells him that the item is not for sale. Killmonger asks her how does she think her ancestors obtained these items in the first place? Did they pay a fair price for them? Or did they, secure in their greater capacity for violence and total contempt for anyone not white, just take them. It's a powerful scene.
People, unfortunately especially people who are descended from colonizers and imperialists, often forget that much of the world's greatest art is in European museums not because of honest trade but because of violence and theft. I was reminded of this because of a recent NY Times article that detailed the halting and slow efforts of two people to convince European museums (in this case a British one) to do the right thing and return stolen art (in this case masks from Benin in what is now Nigeria).
In 2004, Steve Dunstone and Timothy Awoyemi stood on a boat on the bank of the River Niger. In the back of the crowd, Mr. Awoyemi, who was born in Britain and grew up in Nigeria, noticed two men holding what looked like political placards. They didn’t come forward, he said. But just as the boat was about to push off, one of the men suddenly clambered down toward it. “He had a mustache, scruffy stubble, about 38 to 40, thin build,” Mr. Dunstone recalled recently. “He was wearing a white vest,” he added. The man reached out his arm across the water and handed Mr. Dunstone a note, then hurried off with barely a word.
That night, Mr. Dunstone pulled the note from his pocket. Written on it were just six words: “Please help return the Benin Bronzes.” At the time, he didn’t know what it meant. But that note was the beginning of a 10-year mission that would take Mr. Dunstone and Mr. Awoyemi from Nigeria to Britain and back again, involve the grandson of one of the British soldiers responsible for the looting, and see the pair embroiled in a debate about how to right the wrongs of the colonial past that has drawn in politicians, diplomats, historians and even a royal family.
Countdown
directed by Justin Dec
This is a predictable PG-13 horror movie where attractive young people do stupid things to keep the story moving. There are jump scares every other frame. But at least the Black guy doesn't die first. So there's that. These movies all have a certain rhythm.
Someone does something questionable, like buying an ancient lamp from an elderly Roma lady, desecrating a grave, or partying at a wicked family's deserted ancestral home. Bad things happen. Someone with more brain cells than your average door knob realizes that something isn't right. This person, usually with some skeptical friends or supportive strangers, tracks down a paranormal expert.
Sometimes the expert is an incompetent clown. Sometimes the expert has lost faith and must be cajoled back into action. Sometimes the expert is retired.Sometimes the expert is eager to assist and kick a$$ for the Lord!. Sometimes malevolent forces eliminate the expert before he can share critical knowledge. Sometimes the expert is secretly working for malevolent forces.
The friends and/or last survivor make their final stand against the forces of evil. Maybe there's a disbelieving cop or other authority figure who once arrested or otherwise hindered the heroes/heroines. At the end that person usually helps. He (or she) validates the group's story, gets busy with the attractive lead character, or sacrifices himself for the attractive lead character. Countdown didn't break any new ground. I thought the 90 minute run time was too long. The movie touches some interesting points about fate and predestination.
Imagine that you bought a couch or similar item from a thrift store. After you bring it home you find some cash inside of it. And not just a few dimes and pennies or some crusty dollar bills, but about $43,000 in crisp 100s and 20s.
Now in movies and books, the sorts of people who casually leave that kind of money lying around their home also tend to be people who will hire other highly motivated single minded individuals to retrieve that money.
Such folks often ask questions in a direct way that may involve blowtorches, meat hooks, cattle prods, and butterfly knives. So I wouldn't want to deal with anyone like that. And what's right is right. If someone really did misplace that money it's probably not right for me to keep it, is it? Or is it?
I like to think that I would try to discover the rightful owner of the cash. Doing the right thing is important. On the other hand finders keepers, losers weepers. Finding an unexpected $43K is like a wolf finding a bird nest on the ground. You don't ask how it got there, you just eat!
But a Michigan man named Howard Kirby who found this money said he had to do the right thing and return it, even though like many people, he had his own pressing needs. People have come together to praise Kirby and help him with some of his issues.
OVID, MI — When Howard Kirby returned more than $43,000 in cash he found in a couch cushion he bought at a thrift store, the mid-Michigan man said he didn’t want attention or expect a reward.
But doing the right thing has touched others who are now helping Kirby with his needs.
Joker
directed by Todd Phillips
The mixed and somewhat negative critical reaction to Joker was in some aspects more interesting to me than the movie itself. Some people dismissed this movie because they, in my opinion wrongly, assumed that the film was making a politically sympathetic depiction of the type of predominantly though hardly exclusively Caucasian men who describe themselves as incels (involuntary celibates), stalk women, shoot up schools, or vote for Trump.
That interpretation was so wrong that words almost fail me in rejecting that notion. I am old enough to remember when some "mainstream" commentators argued with a straight face that depictions of racialized violence in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing would cause Black people to go crazy and start burning, looting and rioting just because of what they saw on the screen. Some people made similar statements about Joker.
Although it's a mug's game to try to determine what people's purposes are when they make such statements, I think it's fair to say that for some critics, Joker depicts a certain type of person whom they despise not just on ideological grounds but also on existential ones. The joke, if you will, is on them. The title character is not ideological at all. He's mentally disturbed. And that is what drives all of his actions. He's not a mens' rights activist or a political ideologue who's sending pipe bombs to left wing activists. Joker is beyond politics.
The director, though he's definitely not beyond politics, seems to be bemoaning a failure of the social safety net in helping to create a man like the titular character. It's something that is more in line with a left wing approach than a right-wing one.
Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures
by Walter Moers
There are some programming languages in which before you even begin the program you are required to list and define every variable that the program uses. Every last one. No exceptions.
If you don't do this the program won't compile and can't be used. This can be slow and monotonous work but it also is a good way to idiot proof at least some programming work.
In other programming languages the coder doesn't have to do anything as old fashioned as all that tedious listing and defining. He just calls the variable and defines it on the fly. In short he makes it up as he goes along.
The book Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures would definitely fall into the 2nd category were it a programming language. It is a gloriously chaotic novel.
It's only near the middle of the novel that the reader starts to realize (well smarter readers than I likely saw this much earlier) that for all of the insane breakneck pacing, interminable asides, farcical and fanciful creatures that pop up for seemingly no reason, and unrelenting silliness, that the author has pretty methodically followed the steps from the classic Hero's Journey, as popularized by Joseph Campbell. So I don't want to discuss the plot too much.
In a world like and unlike our own or perhaps it is our own world long long ago, there is a continent named Zamonia, which contains a bewildering number of non-human creatures, along with a few humans.
A nameless puppy like creature who is the beloved pet of a kind family of dwarves discovers that he can walk on two legs and talk. Unfortunately, shortly after this discovery he and his entire family are captured by a nomadic group of mentally slow one eyed giants known as Demonocles, whose greatest pleasure involves eating other creatures alive, preferably kicking and screaming.
